Eduardo Galeano, born September 3, 1940, in Montevideo, Uruguay, has had a long and active career as a journalist, historian, and political activist. At the age of 13, he began publishing cartoons for the Uruguayan socialist newspaper El Sol. He attended school in Uruguay and married and divorced several times. When he was in his early 30s, Galeano was imprisoned during a right-wing military coup and later forced to flee from Uruguay to Argentina. Later, another coup and several death threats forced him to leave Argentina for Spain where he lived in exile until he was permitted to return to Uruguay in 1984. Days and Nights of Love and War resulted from an open conversation with his own memory as he tried to understand what had really happened in his life. In 1989, Galeano won the American Book Award for Memory of Fire. His other work includes The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent and Guatemala: Occupied Country. Isabel Allende was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru, the daughter of a Chilean diplomat. When her parents separated, young Isabel moved with her mother to Chile, where she spent the rest of her childhood. She married at the age of 19 and had two children, Paula and Nicolas. Her uncle was Salvador Allende, the president of Chile. When he was overthrown in the coup of 1973, she fled Chile, moving to Caracas, Venezuela. While living in Venezuela, Allende began writing her novels, many of them exploring the close family bonds between women. Her first novel, The House of the Spirits, has been translated into 27 languages, and was later made into a film. She then wrote Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna, all set in Latin America. The Infinite Plan was her first novel to take place in the United States. In Paula, Allende wrote her memoirs in connection with her daughter’s illness and death. She delved into the erotic connections between food and love in Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses. In addition to writing books, Allende has worked as a TV interviewer, magazine writer, school administrator, and a secretary at a U.N. office in Chile. She received the 1996 Harold Washington Literacy Award. She lives in California.

Product Details:

Paperback: 317 pages

Publisher: Monthly Review Press; 25 edition

January 1, 1997

ISBN-10: 0853459916

ISBN-13: 978-0853459910

Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Galeano opened his most famous book, Open Veins of Latin America, with the observation that “The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.” Latin America, has specialized in losing.

As he observed in Open Veins of Latin America, “Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others.” In order to flourish, capitalism requires access to cheap and easily exploitable resources, both of the human and natural varieties. Capitalism excels at enriching industrialized countries at the cost to the rest of the world. As Ernesto Cardenal stated when he was on campus in September, capitalism fails exactly because it has succeeded in doing what it is designed to do: make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

— Eduardo Galeano is one of Latin America’s most distinguished writers, journalists and historians. He is the author of the “Memory of Fire” trilogy, “Open Veins of Latin America,” “Soccer in Sun and Shadow,” and many other works. He is the recipient of the 1999 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom

Marx

In Capital he wrote that “a new and international division of labor springs up [under industrial capitalism], and it converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a pre-eminently industrial field.” In his writings of the 1860s and after he discussed what we would now call conditions of dependency imposed on nations such as Ireland and India.